These changes of colour, variation on hard-and-fast lines, are very frequent and often inappropriate, as with a white horse and a blue horse;[484] one form of the change is not far remote from a Germanic kenning:—
Thus a mother to her son; his answer is of the same kind; and so back and forth for nineteen stanzas, when the poem closes with two stanzas sung by the son happily returned from war. With this parallelism of form goes a parallelism of thought not unlike the implied simile in poetry of the schools; witness the hawk and the relatives, quoted just above, or these improvised verses:—
This is growing a bit too artistic for comfort; and presently in another song direct simile breaks out:—
Improvised or not, these songs are not only of the individual lover, but of the artist, the bard, still close to his throng, to be sure, but with a clear notion of his dignity and a good care for his singing-robes. As one of these bards, though in another tribe,[485] prettily puts it:—
Presently pen and paper will be found for the singer, and at last printer’s ink to spread his songs; the days of communal chorus and communal repetition are numbered. One other effect of the old communal impulse, however, may be noted along with this trick of style. The rhapsode, singer, leader, where he is first seen detaching himself from the throng, has neither the individuality nor the artistic importance of what one now calls a poet. Every one knows the solicitude of Germanic singers to base their song upon tradition, to put their own invention into the background and appeal to the common stock: “we have heard tell of the Spear-Danes,”—“I heard tell of Hildebrand and Hathubrand.” This meant that the tale to be told had the communal stamp, and was worth hearing.[486] Egger[487] notes that the oldest Greek rhapsodes, like their songs, differed not one from the other in glory; the best song was simply the last which had been heard,[488] and there was no trace of rivalry among the bards, no trace of partiality among the hearers. With the next age, the time of Hesiod, came the stress and struggle for a poet’s crown; and since the crown was to be awarded to the best singer, judges were in demand, and so a rough criticism. It is easy to see that this stage would be reached in any growth of poetry when the bard began to talk of his thirty songs and of his quivering bosom; behind that stage lies the stage of the poets as deputies and mouthpieces of the throng; behind that, the throng itself.
We have now to look at a second class of material where primitive repetition, born of strong communal emotion, gets artistic control and so passes into new phases of development; this, confined to no one epoch of culture, must be sought in some universal human impulse. Birth, marriage, death, ought to give rise to such songs. Obviously, however, the first of these will be of the least value, and in point of fact songs of the sort were rarely recorded in early times, and perhaps rarely if ever made. Marriage and death, from the terms of the case, promise far better; and of the two,—for to treat them both would demand excessive space,—we shall take the songs of death, the voceri.[489] A brief glance at the marriage-songs, however, which are mainly sung in communal dance and procession, shows repetition everywhere, increasing with the older stages of culture. In German villages the whole community still has a share in the bridal;[490] while in Tyrol, if a girl goes outside the village for a husband, the youths mob her, tie her to a dung-cart, and lead her through the place, all singing derisive songs, until her father rescues her.[491] Of course, the mobbing of unchaste women who marry is common enough; while in other cases of local indignation, crowds and derisive songs are always in order,[492] being represented under conditions of print by the “ballad,” which can be used as a threat, like the modern reporter’s interview or “exposure.” Gretchen, in her terror, seems to hear these mocking songs. Poor Pamela hoped she would “not be the subject of their ballads and elegies,” if she put an end to herself. But this is the other side of a joyous page. The later epithalamy was sung on private family occasions outside the bridal chamber and Puttenham gives a lively description of such festivities; but public and communal features are the older fact. In Greece[493] the bridal song comes from the festal crowd and accompanies the communal dance; the bride throws bits of food into the village fountain, about which the dances begin,—dances “which are regarded as the last act of the wedding ceremony.” The songs for these dances, moreover, along with verses composed and danced at other stages of the affair, “form a considerable part of the national poetry.”[494] In Albania[495] the bridal bread is baked on Thursday, and the kneading of it is begun with choral songs made for the occasion; on Sunday the marriage takes place, and from the procession of the groom and his friends down to the departure of the pair all is song and dance. The formal dance is opened by bride and groom, when a song is sung: “Raven stole a partridge.—Partridge? What will he do with the partridge?—Play with her, toy with her, and spend his life with her.” English marriage customs, with communal dance and song, were of the same sort;[496] and “the poore Bryde” had to “kepe foote with al dauncers and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shamles soever he be,”—an early puritan view of the case. Song and dance, communal rites throughout, were certainly characteristic of the Germanic wedding in its old estate, as is proved by divers names cited by Müllenhoff in his essay on our old choral verse,[497] and by the fact that a wedding was often called outright “the bridal song.”[498] Neocorus,[499] too, tells of the customs in his time among the folk of the Cimbrian peninsula. In the East, again, down to this day, a wedding, like a funeral, is celebrated by the entire village for a full week; it was on communal epithalamies of the sort that one based the artistic bridal poem such as Budde[500] sees in Solomon’s Song. The modern custom is said to keep many primitive traits. After a wedding,[501] which is usually in March, the pair are treated for seven days “as king and queen,” and songs, now of communal victory and the like, now erotic, are sung by the folk; a great dance, moreover, is danced to the wasf, a song which praises the charms of bridegroom and bride. The chorus is naturally insistent and incessant, and a main characteristic of the songs is repetition.[502] But all folksong of the wedding tells this tale of dance and song, with repetition as the chief feature of the poetical style; and repetition is studied to even better advantage in that communal song of lamentation for the dead, which, for convenience, may pass by its Corsican name of vocero.
Mourners for the dead, now, save in the case of public characters, restricted to kin and friends, but once the whole community, are only mutes or audience to the act of burial; it is clear, however, that the priest and the service, or, as in France, the oration at the grave, along with the reticent group, are deputy for older and indeed still surviving songs of lament improvised and uttered by a near relative, and these again are but a development from the rhythmic wailings of a whole community or clan. Antiquity is no test whatever. A husband who advances to the coffin where his dead wife is lying and gives her a passionate farewell, after the manner of the French, while the funeral guests stand now in sympathetic silence, now with audible manifestations of grief, is doing precisely what Lucian describes as common in his day, barring the extravagance of the previous scene and the violent demonstrations made by Grecian women. Lucian thinks both demonstrations and oration ridiculous,[503] and he gives a kind of parody of the speech which a father makes over the body of his son. So too with the poetical lament, the elegy, mere antiquity goes for nothing; and the question is one of stages of evolution, regardless of chronology, from the communal and choral wail up to the highly individualized and intellectualized monody of grief. The elegy of Simonides over the dead at Marathon was doubtless in its way as artistic as Tennyson’s Ode on Wellington; and the same perspective must be kept in dealing with private outbursts of sorrow. Tennyson’s own lines on the death of his brother are not a whit more modern in tone than the Ave atque Vale of Catullus which inspired them. The more primitive obligation was not to hear in respectful sympathy, not to read with intellectual approval, the oration or the poem, but to weep with them that weep and so to sing with them that sing. Uhland[504] cleverly notes the mythological projection of this older custom in that lament for Balder shared by all animate and inanimate creation. We are not, however, to think of the vocero as sprung from the ceremonies of a primitive funeral. Historians of literature are fond of such a process, and fix upon this or that religious rite as the source of some poem or song; Kögel,[505] for example, traces epic to a ceremonial rite as to its ultimate origin, and, for this particular case, insists that the vocero of a Germanic wife over her husband was a song of magic, a kind of incantation, asserting, wildly enough, that choral lament for the dead was unknown to the Germans of Tacitus, while magic songs had long been in vogue. This is distortion of facts and reversal of natural evolution. By the very terms of social organization, social consent must precede social institutions, and a ceremonial must usually be regarded not as the beginning but as the end of a social process. The prime factor in social expression was consent of rhythm; rhythmic cries at wedding[506] and at funeral do not spring from the religious rites, although this or that wedding-song, this or that threnody, may have had such an origin; the rites are rather themselves an outcome, under priestly control and the hardening of custom into law, of this festal excitement, this communal grief. The priest, even the shaman, is deputy of that throng which was once active and is now passive; and when one considers the literature of death, one finds the earliest stages of funeral lament in that half chaotic chorus of repetition and tumultuous cries which cannot be derived from any ceremony, strictly so called, but is rather on the way to ceremony. At this literature we are now to look.
Homer has preserved in an artistic form echoes of primitive wailing, of primitive repetition and choral cries, when he describes the funeral of Hector.[507] “And the others ... laid him on a fretted bed, and set beside him minstrels, leaders of the dirge, who wailed a mournful lay, while the women made moan with them.” Andromache then leads the lamentation, “while in her hands she held the head of Hector, slayer of men. ‘Husband, thou art gone young from life.’ ... Thus spake she wailing, and the women joined their moan.” Then Hecuba; and again the line like a refrain, “Thus spake she wailing, and stirred unending moan.” Lastly Helen; and again, “Thus spake she wailing, and therewith the great multitude of the people groaned.” Wailings of the throng are echoed also in choruses of Greek tragedy;[508] but it is these epic passages and their details which carry one back into the communal realm, quite away from the satire of Lucian,[509] however some of the features which he describes may seem to be repeated here. The song of lament, whether a domestic duty or a professional act, was mainly a matter for the women, and was originally improvised; at the funeral of Achilles,[510] it is his mother and “the deathless maidens of the waters” who wail about his pyre, and it is the muses themselves who raise the clear chant. So Hildeburh at the funeral pile, in that episode of the Béowulf:[511]—
That a wailing chorus answered her wailing there can be no doubt, though nothing is said of it; that the song is not quoted, that the record of these rites is brief, can be explained easily enough, when one remembers the monk who set down this fine old epic with pagan delight in his heart but a crucifix before his eyes, and constant thunder of ecclesiastical denunciation in his ears. Those neniae inhonestae, the singing of diabolical songs and the dancing of diabolical dances[512] about a corpse, all the “payens corsed olde rites,” were denounced by bishops and councils of the church with a fervid iteration which at once accounts for the silence of the poets and testifies to the stubborn vogue of the ceremony. The dance is of course a survival of very primitive rites, as will be seen in the study of the actual vocero, and as can be learned from ethnology; for the epics it has been developed into funeral games, although in the Béowulf one finds an older stage of these ceremonies than in Homer. Besides Hrothgar’s lament over Aeschere, a lament intensified by the absence of the dead body,[513] and the moanings of old Hrethel for his son,[514] there is the hero’s own funeral, where, when all the clan, presumably, have mourned their lord, presumably in song, and when the wife has sung, like Hildeburh, her giomorgyd, her song of lamentation, at last the ashes are placed in the barrow, and twelve noble youths ride round it chanting the praises of the dead king. A close parallel to this ceremony is found far to the eastward. In what is now known to have been a Gothic rather than a Hunnish rite, warriors rode, “as in the games of the circus,” round the body of Attila where he lay in state, and as they rode sang also a funeral song of praise; Jordanis[515] gives a Latin version of it, but as it stands in this guise, it has a very artistic and even artificial ring. The clan-grief and the clan-praise at Beowulf’s funeral are nearer to the facts. As regards the riding, it is clear that this takes the place of an older dance or march, just as the song takes the place of older wailings and cries. The processions of a whole community, at times of planting and of harvest, round the field, the barn, the village, to which we shall presently refer when considering the refrain, are matched by similar rites of marching with dance and song round hearth, grave, altar, in the ceremonies of wedding and burial. On the Isle of Man a wedding party goes three times round the church before it enters; and in many places the corpse is carried in the same way for a funeral. In the latter case, the solemn march is only a repetition of the dance round the corpse itself, the mourners going hand in hand, now slowly, now tumultuously, to the sound of their own wailing. Ethnological evidence, again, puts the songs and dances for the dead, as found among savage tribes throughout the world, in line with these survivals among the peasantry of Europe; no chain of evidence could be more complete. To this ethnological material we shall presently return; meanwhile it is in order to note the evidence in literature.
We have seen obvious cases of the vocero in oldest English, and it could be followed in other Germanic records. Probably many of the English and Scottish ballads began as a kind of vocero, something like the coronach of Highland clans: one thinks of Bonny George Campbell, with its repetition and refrain, and of The Bonny Earl of Murray, with its triad of incremental repetitions, ballads which follow close upon the death of their hero; of ballads less immediate but still memorial, like The Baron of Brackley, and perhaps The Lowlands of Holland; even of the widely spread ballads of a condemned criminal, the Good Nights, and such admirable precipitates of this kind as Mary Hamilton. For more direct evidence, the refrain line Ohon for my son Leesome Brand![516] is promising; but it is only a line. One vocero, however, has come down to us, although considerably changed from the normal and original pattern. In Aubrey’s Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme,[517] mention is made of “Irish howlings at Funeralls, also in Yorkshire within these 70 yeares (1688)”; and again, quoting the song, This can night, Aubrey says it is from Mr. Mawtese, “in whose father’s youth, sc. about sixty years since (now 1686), at country vulgar Funeralls was sung this song,” by a woman like a praefica. Scott has a like account; it was sung a century ago[518] “by the lower ranks of Roman Catholics in some parts of the north of England. The tune is doleful and monotonous.” The refrain, or, as Scott calls it, the chorus, is very insistent and belongs to genuine communal tradition; he quotes an account of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which was found by Ritson in a manuscript of the Cotton library: “When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie, recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe.” The following stanzas will serve as specimens of this highly developed but interesting vocero:—
In Germany, the vocero lingered long, but is dying or dead; it was an improvised farewell in “free” rhythm.[519] A very interesting communal survival akin to the vocero was known in Flanders down to the year 1840,—The Maids’ Dance[520] at the funeral of a companion; it was sung and danced by the young girls of the parish. When the coffin had been lowered into the grave, all these girls, holding by one hand the cloth which had covered the corpse, went back to the church singing this “dance” with a force and a rhythmic accent which roused the hearer’s surprise.[521] The two stanzas and the refrain are, of course, partly modern; but they show traces of the old dance and vocero noted below as surviving among the Corsicans:—
But there is better material in the literature of other races. Nowhere, for example, is the wailing and chanting of women over the dead better attested than among the Hebrews of the Old Testament; Syrians of to-day hold to the same rites and sing a song of mourning strangely like that which Jeremiah heard twenty-five centuries ago.[522] The lament of David over Saul and Jonathan, known to be an actual kîna, with its personal touch of “my brother,” and its communal refrain, how are the mighty fallen, differs from the professional lamentation of the women, which was in a fixed rhythm,[523] while David’s outburst is spontaneous and “free.” In cases of this kind, to be sure, one must always reckon with the literary and artistic element; but David’s vocero is close to the popular custom, and of more value to the student than the lament of tragedy old and new. Indeed, a kind of declamation over the dead relative is often found in tragedy, with some resemblance to the actual vocero both in matter and in style, but with an alien touch of rhetoric; so Hieronimo, showing the corpse of his son, has the repetition and play of words already noted among the early Elizabethans, and at far remove from that “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!” of the immediate lament:—
and the rest. Hamlet and Laertes at the grave of Ophelia suggest further distortion, turning the lament into a kind of flyting. It is the actual vocero, and the communal conditions of it, from which one learns the course of poetry; and this actual vocero, even in its Homeric form, has two elements, the song of the relative and the answering wail of the throng. With later conditions the single song comes to be professional, as with Hebrews, Romans, and nearly all nations; or else the women move with sympathetic gestures now round the chief mourner, now round the corpse, singing and wailing as they go. Like modern Syria, modern Greece keeps the old custom; the myriologue has many features of the Homeric rite, particularly the primitive trait of improvisation. The song, says Fauriel,[524] is never composed in advance, but is always improvised in the very moment that it is delivered, and is always fitted to the person addressed. “It is always in verse; the verses are always in the metre of other popular songs; and they are always sung.” Each village—and the communal trait is significant—has an air of its own for these lamentations, and sings them to no other air. Hahn’s account[525] is worth quoting. When a man has died, the women of his family make a fearful cry,[526] which brings all the neighbouring women to the house, shrieking, howling, and gesticulating with the mourners. The actual relatives tear their hair, dash their heads against the wall, call upon the dead by name, and scream so loudly[527] and continuously that for a time they often lose their voices.[528] So the women; the men are more calm. The corpse is now washed and clad, whereupon the women seat themselves about it, and the real lament begins. “This is always rhythmic and generally consists of two verses sung by one voice and repeated by the whole chorus of women.” Now it is traditional, now improvised. As fast as one woman is exhausted, another lifts her hand in signal and begins a new verse. On the way to burial they sing in the same fashion.
This song over the dead, which is found throughout the world, in Greenland, in Peru, in the Hebrides, among the Hottentots,[529] shows a course of development in which the detached or literary lament is the latest stage. Here it may be a great poem, pulsing with the grief of nations and close to the common heart, or a mere exercise made by rule; the gay science of Provence, like the school poetry of Germany and England, had minute directions for the making of a good planch.[530] “One may compose a song of lament in any melody,” runs the Catalan rule, “save in the melody of a dance,”—strange exception, when one comes to the dances which so often went with the real vocero; and Master Vinesauf,[531] in his Poetria, called out Chaucer’s well-known gibe[532] by the recipe for a poem of grief. “When you wish to express grief,” he advises, “say something like this;” and an appropriate sentiment follows. That is the literary stage, the detached lament; but behind the little artifice, as behind the great art, lies the real vocero with elements that need to be set in right perspective. We see the corpse, the wailing relatives, the singing relatives, the professional singing women, the whole clan in tumultuous grief, loud discordant cries, a choral wail which is rhythmic and articulate, chanted verses. Of all these the professional singing woman such as Jeremiah invoked, the praefica of Rome, the keener at an Irish funeral, is the nearest to literary lament, and connects the communal with the artistic. Behind her, and taking her place as one follows back the course of evolution, stands the “free” or natural mourner, now and then a man,[533] but usually wife or mother or sister of the dead. Behind these, again, stands the throng itself, the original mourners, clan or horde of a time when the bonds of mere community were stronger than any ties of kin, and when individual grief was hardly if at all lifted from the communal level; and with this stage one has come from elaborate verse, through choral lament, to mere iteration of clamorous grief, rhythmical by the consent of a throng and by the compulsion of dance, gesture, and spasmodic utterance. In this communal refrain, then, we reach the origin of all laments; here is surely one, at least, of the “beginnings of poetry”; and in the vocero of Corsica break forth even yet those cadenced interjections which were heard throughout the Orient, spread over Greece in the wailings for Adonis, and echo in the repeated denunciation of Jeremiah: “They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah my brother! or Ah sister!—They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah Lord! or Ah his glory! He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.”[534] But these earliest cadenced cries are best approached by means of the second stage; and the song of grief can still be heard in Corsica from wife or mother of the dead, with all the force and naturalness of the vocero as it is described by Homer and in the Béowulf. Elsewhere, of course, and in Italy itself, one can find material of the sort. D’Annunzio describes, in terms said to be rigorously correct, a peasant mother’s improvised vocero at sight of her drowned boy.[535] After a few moments of silence, broken only by wild outcries, she begins her spontaneous song in a short, panting rhythm, rising and falling with the palpitations of her heart; a characteristic noted also by writers on the Corsican vocero.
We turn, then, first to this Corsican lament.[536] Voceri they call the songs, as one might say “vociferations,” a name doubtless due to the gridatu or inarticulate wailings of the throng, which precede the vocero proper; lamenti and ballati are terms sometimes used instead, the second, of course, referring to those dances which were once an inseparable part of the rite, but are now seldom seen. “Make wide the circle,” runs one lament, “and dance the caracolu; for this sorrow is very sore.”[537] As for the song itself, it is briefly but adequately defined[538] as an “improvised funeral song,” sung by a near female relative of the dead man, in a strophe of six verses with four measures to the verse, that verse beloved everywhere of communal poetry; and since the same occasion begets them all, all voceri have considerable likeness one to another, with recurrence of word and phrase. The speech of Corsica is itself rudely poetic; and these improvisations, though full of traditional passages,—“sweeter than honey”; “better than bread,”—are direct in their diction, even to a point that seems at first sight to deny such a fundamental communal trait as repetition. Iteration, however, is there, insistently there, when one takes into account not only the refrain, always breaking down into sobs and repeated moans, but the evident suppression of repetition in the text. As to the refrain, the leader now bids all present join her in this wailing cry, and now bids them cease in order that she may be heard:—
and now, again, she takes the refrain bodily into her own song, beginning thus a new stanza. “Di, di, dih! Woe is me! Make one great cry of sorrow, brothers and sisters all,” sings a wife over her husband; and this inarticulate bit of chorus, always sung, as Marcaggi says,[539] at the end of each stanza, by the women who surround the corpse, may be the imitation—echo would better hit the truth—of the old sobbing of the throng. As for the text, repetition is hardly to be expected in print, and the editors have doubtless done as Lyngbye did with Faroe ballads, though here and there occurs a line[540] like,—
They are keen to record the power of improvisation shown by their countrywomen; what use to print pages of iteration? A fine hint, however, can be found in Marcaggi’s forewords, not only of the silly sooth but of the old time; he saw, he says, “one day a poor woman run shrieking from her house, her hair disordered, and coming to the public square, where the corpse of her sister-in-law lay, sing in a mournful and monotonous note, with grotesque leaps and bounds:—
People said,” adds Marcaggi, “that she was following the custom of a former age, and that she lacked proper reserve.”[541] This is, indeed, the more primitive note; and the iterated cry, mere appeal to the dead, like those cris d’enterrement which Bladé heard at Gascon burials, was once sung by the swaying and dancing throng of mourners. Psychologically and physiologically this is quite in order; a kind of communal hysterics, intensely rhythmical, as with a badly frightened child, as with insanity, delirium, abnormal emotion of any kind, has the cadent and recurrent note at its utmost; and this woman, with her “lack of decorum,” like that peasant on the beach by the drowned boy, is the modern survivor and deputy of panic emotion, a belated case in the pathology of epidemic grief. Between this mere iterated cry, as was said above, and the later professional song of lament,[542] lie the bulk of Corsican voceri, sung by sister or mother of the dead, and most characteristic when it is a violent death which they deplore and when they will stir to vengeance a group of male relatives standing sullenly by the corpse. For while a vocero in the case of some peace-parted soul, such as the village priest, is often a decorous and comforting office,[543] the passion of the thing is felt only over the bier of a man murdered in feud. St. Victor, whom all the others quote on this point, describes the scene. At first, in the chamber of death, rises a great wail of lament, through which oaths of vengeance flash like lightning; men draw their daggers, and dash their guns upon the stone floor; women dip their handkerchiefs in the blood still oozing from the wounds;[544] sometimes they are moved to a frenzy that vents itself in dancing round the corpse amid loud cries, until silence is demanded and the dead man’s mother, wife, sister, moves to the bier and begins her vocero. There is no art in it; “the excuse for its violence is in its explosive force, ... it sings through the mouth of a wound.” It begins, however, in a plaintive way, calls tenderly upon the dead, then tells the story of his taking off; now the gently cadenced movements of the singer grow more violent, and presently she breaks into a storm of imprecations and into wild appeals for the vendetta.[545] One after another of these singers improvises such a lament, and for every stanza a chorus of sobs and cries and moans, often, one gathers, of articulate words, rises from the throng. The passion, too, is real; readers who come of northern blood must banish certain associations of the cardboard castle, the cloak and sword, loud baritone confidences, and stage moonlight. These voceri of vengeance are not rated as rant by the law, which often and vainly tries to put them down. Thus among the Basques, a race, as George Borrow declared, not of poets but of singers, laws were passed against the old fashion of the funeral;[546] it was forbidden “to make lamentations, to tear one’s hair, to bruise the flesh, to wound one’s head, to chant death-songs.” A Basque chorus of lament is described by Michel. “All the women join in it with deep sighs and cries of grief, addressed now to the dead and now to themselves; they begin with high tones, then fall into a deep note, and pronounce from time to time ayené, a Basque word which means Alas!” It is quite clear that in these repeated words of the chorus one finds the origin of the vocero, the “cry” of communal grief; and a study of such cries at the actual burial, as they are still heard in Gascon funerals,[547] shows to what beginnings one must refer the more elaborate voceri of the Corsicans. As early as 1340 a law was passed at Tarbes against “cries and lamentations at the return from a burial.” According to Bladé, the Gascon burial cries are a kind of recitative, lacking rime and even what modern ears demand in the way of rhythm, for they are now divorced from the dance, and at best are timed to the steps of the procession. They begin when a funeral procession starts from the church to the cemetery, and are a series of “distinct exclamations combined into irregular stanzas”; mostly they begin “in a high note, falling slowly, to rise again at the end.” The iteration of these cries is insistent; Bladé quotes a long cri of the sort:[548]—
Then the first stanza is repeated. The choral possibilities of this cry are clear enough, and sung to the dance about a corpse, as was undoubtedly the primitive case, its rhythm would have been exact and no “recitative.” A further step is taken when individual and artistic touches make themselves felt in a pretty little cri which is sung by a mother[549] over her child:—
Repetition is the original rhythm, the original poem; then comes improvisation by the individual, begetting the increment and founding a “text,” while variation plays upon the repeated words. Such is the course of poetry, and in particular of the vocero; repetition lies at the heart of it. Wetzstein,[550] describing the Syrian song of lament sung by the women, lays stress upon the constant iteration in it, and upon the chorus which consists mainly of a single word,—“woe!” “alas!”—counterpart of the chorus in Corsican and Basque voceri. Indeed, the vocero is not only inscribed with woe, but was once nothing else; and fragments of this or that “cry” of burial and of death found their way into the mythology and the recorded poetry of Phœnicians, of Egyptians, and of Greeks. Brugsch,[551] in his study of the songs about Adonis and Linos, makes it clear that Linos was simply a personification of these Phœnician cries of lament, ai lenu, the choral “alas!” or “woe to us!” The refrain or repeated cry of grief sung by mourners about their dead finds thus both mythical and ritual projection and the immortality insured by great artistic song. This ai, ai, seems to be one of the oldest choral funeral cries, common, as Brugsch puts it, “to the whole Orient as well as Egypt”; and he follows it down to the exquisite elegy of Bion. Linos, in the vintage songs, was made a personification of this cry,[552] became a Greek, was said to be buried in Argos, and was worshipped on Helicon amid lamentations of matron and maid gathered at the yearly festival. One remembers Ezekiel’s wrath over the women who, in the gate of the Lord’s house, were weeping for Tammuz. In the Egyptian lament of Isis for Osiris, the opening words, “Come back,” are repeated, as in the choral cry from which it sprang, and are in accord not only with the vocero of Europe, but with the refrain of a dirge in India:[553]—